Crafting Iron Man's Story

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Adapting a movie script to a game is no easy task.

By Jeffrey Tseng

Hi there, my name is Jeffrey Tseng and I am the Game Director for the Iron Man game on 360 and PS3 being made here at Secret Level. My role is to formulate and direct the creative vision of the game from start to finish.

Writing the story for the Iron Man game was a challenge because we knew we had to follow two rigid foundations. First and foremost, we needed to be true to the vision of Iron Man as presented in the movie. The Iron Man movie will be the first time that many people have ever seen the Armored Avenger, and we needed to be consistent with the characters, personalities, and story line of what they understood to be Iron Man. On the other hand, we also needed to satisfy the legions of Iron Man comic book fans who are looking for more elements from and faithfulness to the stories that they are so familiar with.

The man in the iron mask.

Though these two foundations may seem at odds, I think they ended up providing a great base for our story. After reviewing the script of the movie, we pulled out the critical action sequences that we would re-create in our game. It turned out that the vast majority of the missions in our game could be completely unique. We could then create a story that would overlap the movie at key points, but the majority of it would be new and original content. This was the perfect opportunity to insert characters and groups from Iron Man's history in order to fill out the game.

One of the first considerations in creating the story was how to do the storytelling. We looked at Tony Stark and why so many people are drawn to him, and we felt that a huge part of it were his flaws – the internal struggles he experiences throughout his history (we all really wanted to show that flaw, but that'll be saved for later…). This trait led to a perfect split in storytelling. We would portray the internal, emotional struggles as cinematics with Tony Stark, Pepper Potts, Jim Rhodes, and Obadiah Stane, while leaving the external, physical challenges for when he was Iron Man in the missions.

A flawed man.

So we had determined how to tell the story – what were the details? In parallel, we were looking through Iron Man's history to find characters and groups that would resonate with dedicated fans. Maggia, Advanced Idea Mechanics, Titanium Man, and other characters in the game all came from this extensive research (reading comic books is tough work!). At the same time, we were also coming up with environments and missions that would be fun to play.

Weaving these things together was hard work. The Tony Stark cinematic script was written first. These sequences would most clearly outline the progression and motivations of the main characters in the story. After getting it close to complete, we were able to sit down with Robert Downey Jr. to review it and make sure it was consistent with the film. It was important for the cinematic script to be clear since the rest of the dialogue would be told during gameplay, and the player would likely be more interested in shooting down enemies than listening to the poetic script. Mission dialogue would concentrate on the information needed to understand the details of a particular mission.

The story is split between gameplay and cinematics.

Interestingly, we finished the first cinematic scripts fairly early on in the process, but the mission dialogue scripts needed the missions to be near complete before they could be finalized. This created a large dependency issue, since the scripts needed to be done before the voice recordings, which needed to be mastered and translated and recorded into other languages, etc. It was pretty tight, but we got them all done in time. Somehow. I think we may have shaved a few years off of some people's lives.